French GP Free Practice: Jordan
02/07/2004 Intermittent rain showers persisted through free practice today, limiting Jordan Ford's progress with the weekend's programme, however the team was able to accomplish some tyre evaluation with Timo Glock and wet set-up with Giorgio Pantano and Nick Heidfeld. This weekend the Jordan cars' "Message from Bahrain" is the emblem of DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), an organisation which aims to raise awareness about and spark response to crises it sees in Africa: unpayable Debts, uncontrolled spread of AIDS, and unfair Trade rules which keep Africans poor. The organisation was founded in 2002 by Bono, the lead singer of U2, along with Bobby Shriver and activists from the Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt campaign. Timo Glock: The beginning was a bit difficult, with the track dry then wet then dry again at the end. The car felt good in the conditions, it was fun to drive and quick. Unfortunately at the end when the track had dried we had brake problems and so missed the last few minutes of the session. Nick Heidfeld: It was a disappointing day for everybody really as the bad weather conditions restricted everybody's work. It is probably more of a hindrance for our team though; because we haven't done as much testing as other teams over the last few months. We have not gathered enough data for tomorrow so it's going to be difficult to make the tyre choiceso it is good this decision is delayed until midday tomorrow. Giorgio Pantano: Well it was quite interesting today! The weather changed all the time and every quarter of an hour the track was different: wet, dry, combinations of the two, and practice was quite entertaining as a result. However, it was quite difficult to understand the tyres, the set-up and everything with the conditions. In the end I think we got to understand a bit and we know the problems with the car so we'll see what happens with the weather tomorrow. James Robinson: Obviously everybody experienced the same very changeable weather as we did today. We felt it was important to keep Timo running to try and do the tyre work when the track was at its driest and it was about being out on the right tyre at the right time. We accomplished nowhere near as much as we wanted to but we have got some work done. We needed to do some wet running with one of the tyres that we hadn't had a chance to run in the wet before but otherwise with two wet sessions today we decided to conserve engine miles on the race cars to assist with reliability for Sunday. |
